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rob05c  ·  3784 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sentencing, by the Numbers

    markers of socioeconomic disadvantage increase a defendant’s risk score

Translation: if you're poor and black, you get more jail time.

    The risk-prediction instruments are not very transparent (some are proprietary corporate products)

Even better. So when you're poor, you also get a public defender who isn't skillful enough to recognize the racial and economic profiling of "evidence based sentencing" to even defend you against it.

This is absolutely horrifying. This is not justice. This is twisting statistics to corrupt the criminal justice system into an aristocratic tool of oppression.

The first step to correcting this is transparency. The second is recognizing that strict Utilitarianism is neither moral nor just. The third is educating the public enough to recognize a simple single level of indirection.